1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to tobacco harvesters and more specifically to a tobacco harvester and trailer arrangement adapted to be pulled by a single tractor and having a unique defoliating and conveying arrangement for the tobacco leaves from the tobacco plants to the trailer.
2. Prior Art
For many years the harvesting of tobacco has been a manual operation. The tobacco must be harvested at a particular time in the growing season and the leaves of the plant ripen at different times. The leaves ripen progressively from the bottom to the top of the stalk thereby necessitating five or six successive passes through the field to remove the ripened leaves. Such manual harvesting methods required a great deal of manpower which has become increasingly scarce and more expensive in recent years.
The first type of mechanical tobacco harvester consisted primarily of a frame upon which the leaf primers would ride through the field as they manually remove the leaves.
In recent years various other types of mechanical tobacco harvesters were developed wherein the harvester would straddle the row of tobacco plants and a rotating defoliator would strip the lower leaves from the plant onto a conveyor mechanism for transfer to a suitable receptacle. The majority of these mechanical tobacco harvesters which carry out a priming operation are self-propelled and straddle one row of tobacco at a time. Other types of tobacco harvesters are adapted to be rigidly mounted on the side of a tractor but this type of tobacco harvester can only be utilized where the entire tobacco plant is cut and stripped since it is impossible to effectively operate on any row of tobacco except the one closest to the tractor. Generally, tobacco fields are planted with every fifth row missing to allow for the passage of tractors and trailers through the field. Thus, the tractor mounted units would be unable to harvest the middle rows of each group of four rows without first cutting down the outermost rows.